Path to Craftsmanship

Ideas on getting to be a software craftsman. Practical lessons.

The current repository started as an idea to put into writing the learning steps that Georgiana followed over her career. The notes can be consulted in a separate file. Later, in a talk on devforum.ro the idea of a group of contributors arised.

General Principles

Generations

Writing this guide is done in "generations". They will not necessarily be followed in order, sequentially, but intermingled, sometimes even like nested loops.

First generation:

First write this documentation just as a "meta-guide", with the finished structure (parts / chapters / sections) and short abstracts for each. Once done, this documentation can already be used by a potential reader for guiding his own independent research / learning process.

Second generation:

Each section is written by different authors in "mini feedback loops", peer-reviewed on their own

Third generation:

Being written by different authors, the wording will differ. In order to counteract this, one designated person will go through all parts / chapters / sections and rephrase them without changing the meaning of the text.

Fourth generation:

Reader's feedback and integration into the guide / book.

Writing Principles

The following are principles aimed at harmonizing the documentation which is yet to be written.

• always use the right terminology
• understand how something works under the hood, but go at most 1 level deeper at a time For instance: when you learn a server-side web scripting language (Application Layer), you need to understand HTML first. When learning HTML, you need to understand HTTP first.

Structure of Each Chapter / Section

Each chapter or section (henceforth called generally unit of writing, abv. UOW) must have a certain structure.

• chapters start with an abstract
• UOW start with an estimated time-to-finish
• some UOWs start with a motivation (answering the question why learning this is important?)
• some UOWs have a subdivision Common Pitfalls which contains exclusively misunderstandings commonly observed among readers
• some UOWs have a subdivision Frequent Questions which contains exclusively questions which have been asked more than twice by readers
• exercises: ???
• each chapter ends with a Summary